The present invention generally relates to an information service for providing financial information to issuers, and particularly relates to a comprehensive financial information service on the World Wide Web (xe2x80x9cWebxe2x80x9d), which includes a content display web page for displaying a plurality of customizable pre-selected sets of information.
In recent years, financial information has become more and more available due to the increase in the number of financial information service providers establishing informational sites on the Web. Investors, and issuers, routinely face the time consuming task of finding relevant information from among the overwhelming amount of information that is provided by the various information services. For example, the investors must engage in the time consuming search of databases in order to compile a listing of the desired information. This makes monitoring of, for example, trends in stock prices for one or a group of stocks a time consuming task. Such expenditure of time adversely affects the timely availability of information which may be crucial in decision-making. Therefore, it is desirable to have a financial service that reduces the time required for the search of financial information.
An object of this invention is to reduce the time that is required for finding financial information from among various information services, such as on-line news services, information services and financial databases.
Another object of this invention is to devise a single information service for providing access to a plurality of on-line news services, information services and financial databases in order to reduce the time that is required for finding information from various information sources.
Yet, another object of this invention is to devise an information service whereby the issuer can pre-select sets of information from, for example, selected financial information services such as databases to further reduce the time that an issuer spends on finding information each time the investor accesses the financial information service of the present invention.
The present invention is a method and a system for providing financial information from various information sources via a network of computers such as the Internet, wherein the provided information is selected and retrieved from the various financial sources based on pre-selected sets of parameters, the parameters being selectable on a shared basis between two users, such that one user may pre-select one or more set of parameters for another user.
What is disclosed as an embodiment of the invention is a financial information system for providing information to a user on a display terminal connected to a network of computers, which includes: an information source; a customization database containing records having pre-selected parameters for retrieval of information from the information source; and a processor connected to the network that sends the selected and retrieved information to the display terminal. In the disclosed system, the parameters for selection and retrieval of information from the information source can be pre-selected by at least two users on a shared basis. This means that the system allows the parameters to be pre-selected by one user for retrieval of information from the information source to be displayed in the display terminal for another user.
The system allows for the creation and storage of a plurality of such parameters. The parameters are stored in a customization database, and may be named by users and retrieved by their names. In the disclosed system, the retrieved information is displayed in independently functioning display module which are included in a web page. Some of the information display modules include a function which allows at least two users to pre-select parameters for retrieval of information from the information source on a shared basis.